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Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

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Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#41

Post by docker_up »

Apple appears to be coming to some sort of head at this point. This is speaking as someone heavily invested in Apple products and shares.

Their iPhones have reached a peak, where it appears people are no longer willing to pay so much for them. They are too damn expensive, with nothing to justify their costs. I am one of the morons who upgraded to the XS, but only because I needed the 512GB storage. If not for the increased storage needs, I wouldn't have upgraded and I know for a fact there is really no difference after using it for several months. I have no plans on updating to the next one, the first time since iPhone 3.

MacBooks are worse now than they were since 2015. I won't upgrade until they get rid of the TouchBar. I would rather go back to Windows than use that stupid TouchBar.

Apple software is terrible. iTunes is still the worst piece of software that I'm forced to use. The bugs they've had are inexcusable.

Apple is the richest company in the world, and instead of paying their engineers top wages, they are wasting it on stock buybacks. Until their revenues decrease year-over-year they won't change their ways.

To put it bluntly, Apple is extremely, extremely arrogant and I hope they will pay their price in the next few years. It feels like all product lines are either too expensive and/or worse quality than even a few years previous. Many people unhappy or unimpressed with their products, but they don't give a damn.

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#42

Post by nickflood »

blinkingled wrote: post #15
jes5199 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ugh I need to install that update. My X1 doesn’t even sleep right in Windows

Well there is no sleep in Windows - it's connected standby - which puts everything in low power mode but running. I ran W10 on it few months but don't recall having issues with conn stdby. Yeah definitely update to the latest BIOS though - 1803 issues maybe sorted by the update.

You can normally enable classic sleep in Windows by setting the CsEnabled key in registry to zero. That's how I'm doing it on my XPS 15 9570. Still trash of a laptop, but now it sleeps proprly :)

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#43

Post by baybal2 »

jes5199 wrote: post #13
blinkingled wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to install a BIOS update. To be fair though even without S3 sleep it is easy to drop Linux power consumption on the X1C6 to ~2.5-3W with display off and no Linux user worth their salt is afraid of installing a BIOS update which literally adds a 'Linux' mode for sleep after which it's flawless. The BIOS update even installs without needing Windows now a days - LVFS even.

ugh I need to install that update. My X1 doesn’t even sleep right in Windows

> ugh I need to install that update. My X1 doesn’t even sleep right in Windows

So, it is even Thinkpad guys who can't write proper bioses these days?

Is there a single laptop out there where you can say the bios is truly flawless?

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#44

Post by ascar »

panic wrote: post #11
crazygringo wrote: post #6

I'm curious... since it seems like a number of high-profile bugs often tend to be with clock- or date-related things... is there a set of best practices somewhere around creating time-related tests? A complete list of situations to test under? I'll confess that testing that my software works while a user (or daemon) changes the system clock is something that I don't think has ever occurred to me, and now I'm wonderin…

Part of the problem is that it's hard to determine all the possible situations you could be in -- changing the time during a DST transition while using the Islamic calendar and so on. Formal methods are relatively inaccessible in general, but I wonder if you could make an easy-to-use verification tool specifically focused on date/time code.

You are right that it's near impossible and unpractical to test all edgecases. But your example goes into the wrong direction. Shouldn't you build your system completely agnostic of time interpretation changes? A DST transition is not actually changing the time. The bug here seems to be coming from system clock updates. I honestly also never thought testing against system clock updates. If I schedule something to happen in 10 seconds I never expected the system clock might be shifting backwards and 10 seconds might become minutes or more. But that should be so super rare.

What is a realistic code example that might have problems with system clock updates?

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#45

Post by iainmerrick »

mastazi wrote: post #21
komali2 wrote: post #7

That's a weird glitch, and generally I'm not a fan of apple hardware (I think it's overpriced, that their keyboards suck, that they don't have enough ports, and I don't enjoy working in osx), but this article comes off as almost biblically haughty. Apple should have tests around clock updates affecting external audio quality? I mean, maybe after this bug being discovered, sure, but before, was that a connection that…

The article comes from CDM which is a music production website, MacBooks are very popular in that field, and basically all audio producers use external audio interfaces, it's not an uncommon use case. This is not the first time that this type of issues happens (from memory, last year an OSX update broke compatibility with Native Instruments Maschine, a very popular music software). So I think the point that the artic…

music producers are one of the most Apple-leaning crowds, and yet they feel like they are being ignored by Apple. [...] this is a small market in the grand scheme of things.

This is the same point that’s often made about developers. But if it’s not developers and it’s not music producers, what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else? And are they at least getting the products and features they want?

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#46

Post by kkarakk »

siquick wrote: post #14
uvu wrote: post #3

Generally, Apple MacBook Pro suck since 2017!

Not sure why this getting downvoted. Had my MBA for 6 years and worked perfectly the whole time, just needed to install a new battery after 4 years but that was a personal preference. I've had my MBP w/o touch bar for 13 months and I seriously regret spending $2300 on it. - The keyboard is continually sticking, the left Command key is now completely separated from the keyboard and falls out all the time. I make so ma…

bought the lowest end macbook pro 2017(coz that's the only one without the touchbar). applecare has replaced(drumroll):

1.Keyboard

2.Screen for weird glitching issues

and now the wifi refuses to connect to 5ghz bands

i use a bluetooth mechanical keyboard now...

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#47

Post by unmole »

iainmerrick wrote: post #45
mastazi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article comes from CDM which is a music production website, MacBooks are very popular in that field, and basically all audio producers use external audio interfaces, it's not an uncommon use case. This is not the first time that this type of issues happens (from memory, last year an OSX update broke compatibility with Native Instruments Maschine, a very popular music software). So I think the point that the artic…

music producers are one of the most Apple-leaning crowds, and yet they feel like they are being ignored by Apple. [...] this is a small market in the grand scheme of things. This is the same point that’s often made about developers. But if it’s not developers and it’s not music producers, what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else? And are they at least getting the products and features they want?

> what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else?

Hipsters?

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#48

Post by lowlevel »

Generally, pro-audio users lag behind on OS updates and hardware updates. Apple generally has problems with audio with every new generation, and this is nothing new. When you count on something to work, you tend to buy the old models.. you tend to run the previous known good OS... you tend to avoid updating anything as much as possible. This is only getting worse as apples software and hardware quality are severely degrading over the past few years. Pro users are leaving left right and center.

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#49

Post by sterlind »

komali2 wrote: post #7

That's a weird glitch, and generally I'm not a fan of apple hardware (I think it's overpriced, that their keyboards suck, that they don't have enough ports, and I don't enjoy working in osx), but this article comes off as almost biblically haughty. Apple should have tests around clock updates affecting external audio quality? I mean, maybe after this bug being discovered, sure, but before, was that a connection that…

It's what integration tests are for! Have a lab full of machines running popular workflows on lots of existing applications. One would hope their rigs compare sound out the audio port with expected waveforms; they certainly have the budget for it.

Re: Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug

#50

Post by mk89 »

docker_up wrote: post #41

Apple appears to be coming to some sort of head at this point. This is speaking as someone heavily invested in Apple products and shares. Their iPhones have reached a peak, where it appears people are no longer willing to pay so much for them. They are too damn expensive, with nothing to justify their costs. I am one of the morons who upgraded to the XS, but only because I needed the 512GB storage. If not for the inc…

>Apple is the richest company in the world, and instead of paying their engineers top wages,

Any numbers saying that they earn just an average salary?

Also, why would the touchbar be an engineering issue? Some people like it. (I don't)

I do understand your concerns and I agree with some of them, I just don't believe it's because they pay their engineers less, or they are not good enough.

Some decisions come from top management. If there is only capacity to fix 10 bugs, well, that's it. I don't even see this large amount of features delivered on a monthly basis, so I assume their plan is really to invest just on their iPhones and hardware, maybe.

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